Introducing Drupal 7

More than two years in the making, and with several major sites already using it, a beta of the next version of Drupal is imminent - making this is a great time to start thinking about Drupal 7 for your projects.

The London Drupal Community, in association with The Guardian Open Platform and generous sponsorship from Microsoft, invites you to an evening of presentations and discussion exploring the exciting new features of Drupal 7.

Presentations

Presentations will start at 6:20pm

Drupal 7 Overview
A quick guide to all the major features in Drupal 7. Based on the article in Linux User (August 2010) by Barry Pretsell and Robert Castelo.

Robert Castelo, Director, Code Positive

The Semantic Web: Resource Description Framework (RDF)
How RDF will give meanning to the information on your site and boost your SEO.

Fintan Galvin, Owner & MD, iO1

Database Abstraction With PDO: MS SQL Server Support
How using PDO as the database abstraction layer enables support for databases such as MS SQL Server.

Andy Robb, Microsoft

Designing UI With Seven
Why Seven, the new admin theme for Drupal 7, looks the way it does, and the the UI conventions it provides.

Mark Boulton, Director, Mark Boulton Design
Leisa Reichelt, Freelance User Experience Designer & Researcher, Disambiguity

Drupal 7 Theming
How Drupal 7 makes it easier to style your site.

Marek Sotak, Director, Atomic Ant

Food, Drink, and Books

Microsoft are generously sponsoring pizza and beer, and Packt Publishing have kindly donated Drupal books to be won by a few lucky attendees.

Pub After Event

We will move to the Lincon Lounge pub after the last presentation at 9 p.m. (52 York Way, N1 9AB)

Online

The tag for this event is #drupal_ldn, all presentations will be available after the event, and we may be providing live streaming.

What Is Drupal?

Out of the box Drupal provides a rich toolset for quickly setting up and maintaining a website, including content management and advanced community building features.

Drupal is also framework for rapid development, so new features such as eCommerce can be quickly added by installing a plug in from a library of existing modules, over 6,000 currently available - or you can develop your own modules and plug them in.

Who's Using Drupal?

The White House, New York Observer, MTV UK, The Economist....and many more. You've probably been to a Drupal site without realising it!

Organisors and Sponsors

This event is organised by Mark Baker, Code Positive, and The Guardian Open Platform.

Mark Baker is European Channel Development Director at Brightcove, and an Open Source sales and marketing expert.

Code Positive are Drupal London consultants with a long history of involvement in the Drupal community.

Microsoft is generously sponsoring pizza and drinks.

The Guardian Open Platform is a suite of services that enables partners to build applications with the Guardian. The first two products released as part of the platform were the Content API and the Data Store. The Guardian have since added the World Government Data Store, the Politics API and now the MicroApp framework.